


In the Witch's Tower

by Farla



Category: The Witcher (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Rapunzel Elements, btp, rbtf
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-19
Updated: 2020-10-19
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:27:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27109489
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Farla/pseuds/Farla
Summary: From the outside, Yennefer tells her, it looks like a simple enough little house with a window in the attic, and when she leans far enough out from the window she can almost see it herself. It makes her eyes hurt.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 9
Collections: Sordid Saovine - The Witcher Halloween Event





	In the Witch's Tower

From the outside, Yennefer tells her, it looks like a simple enough little house with a window in the attic, and when she leans far enough out from the window she can almost see it herself. It makes her eyes hurt.

"Don't do that," Yennefer tells her sometimes, when Yennefer's there, and she pulls her head back inside the tower. Sometimes she stays quiet and Yennefer stays for a while and then disappears. Sometimes she starts talking and starts shouting and Yennefer disappears right then.

She leans out the window until her head spins and splits and most of the time, there's no one to say anything.

She should keep her head inside, stay quiet and still. But she paces the rooms and runs her hands over the things and tastes each bite of food.

She should dream of sand. She remembers it, the grit clumping around her wet fingers and the dust stinging down her throat, way it drank the spilled blood. But she doesn't dream of it, or of any other way it goes. She dreams of everything else instead, places she's never seen populated by people she's never met. After she gave up sobbing and raging and blaming and promising, because there was no one but the walls and chairs to see her performance of caring, she dreamed so much she lost track of what wasn't a dream. She suspects it means that, whatever she says and however she acts, she doesn't truly regret it.

It's far, the distance from tower window to ground, but it's a surmountable distance for someone motivated. The man who finds Yennefer's simple enough little house in the woods can't get in the false cottage's door, but when she ties the sheets together into a rope and throws it down, he can climb up to the true tower's window.

It's hard, but he can climb up.

He's owed from all the work he did. She understood as her hands twisted together knot after knot tight enough to hold. She knows the story she was born into and she knows what happens next. She knows what men climb towers for. It hurts more than she remembered, but she doesn't cry until Yennefer catches them together, pulls him off, and stabs a knife into his throat.

Then she howls. She howls and sobs and hits Yennefer, shouts, "You're not even here! At least he wanted something!" What does Yennefer want but to keep her within stone walls like a fish swimming circles in a courtyard pond?

When her own bleeding stops, well, she knows the story. And she's always been good at that one part.

She wonders if she should think having it's like some sort of apology, some sort of redemption, and that's impossible, she knows, but she thinks that she can dismiss the idea of it instead of wanting it so much she lies to herself is another mark against her as well. Believing there's anything she could do to make up for it would be terrible of her as well, all of it's ways to be terrible. What are the first three, what do they count for in whatever ledger? Nothing. You are only ever the sum of how far you've fallen short. There are no good mothers, just ones who are bad and ones who are worse.

She's a monstrous one, the sort who should be dead, and that she doesn't want to be dead just proves that, and that she thinks to herself that it's not like dying would be enough to make it up anyway so why should she, that proves it too.

"Do you want to end the pregnancy?" Yennefer asks when she complains about the fit of her clothes, carelessly exposes the deforming bulge where her waist should narrow because it's years past the point she has anything to be coy about. "After..."

"Do what you want," she tells Yennefer. "Everything here is yours anyway." The floor, the food, the sheets, the window, the clothing, the body and the body growing inside it. Nothing to do with her.

Yennefer goes away.

Yennefer brings new clothes.

Yennefer goes away, and appears, and goes away, and appears, and goes away.

When the contractions start, she drinks what Yennefer hands her without question. The liquid coils for a minute in her stomach and then hooks her out of her flesh with neat precision, folds her up and up ever more tightly until she's just a thin smear crushed against the back of her eyes. The whole affair is dull. She's boring, she knows, this all proves how suited to the place she is. She should surely welcome the labor and refuse the drink if she cared so much about feeling something, just as if she was truly suffering in this tower she'd have beaten herself bloody on the stones already.

Yennefer is there for some interminable time but eventually goes away again, and she assumes that means it's done. She lies there until she thinks to wonder at the quiet. Perhaps Yennefer has a spell for silence and the sound of a child's wail bothered Yennefer more than any sound she ever made. She's so bored lying there she thinks she might finally die so she finally sits up and finds just herself and the bloody afterbirth in bed. That annoys her a little, because she knows that there's still some danger of things going wrong until that comes out too but if it's here untouched then Yennefer likely left as soon as the child came out fine, and she can't claim any right to someone caring what happens to her and she can't say Yennefer did anything wrong but, it annoys her a little. She gets up eventually, on feet she still can't feel, to find out if Yennefer did a spell to make it so quiet.

The witch of the tower turns out to be doubled over in a chair, skin wet with sweat and blood, a sad monster limp in her lap. It doesn't move, though it had moved back when it was inside of her. The upper part is the ugly wrinkled squish of a newborn and then below the umbilical cord it tapers sharply away into a narrow tube of smooth wormlike flesh ending in something closer to a flipper than a foot. Not a daughter this time. Not anything.

She wonders what Yennefer will do to her now that she's plumbed new depths of uselessness. She could be dropped from the window. Returned to the nearest town, or the farthest, surely it's all the same. Could have her throat cut like it was supposed to be years ago. She could be left here to swim her circles without Yennefer ever returning.

"No, this is my fault," Yennefer says without looking up, voice flat with exhaustion. She wonders how much magic it takes to keep half a child alive and she wonders which of them gave out first. "I'm - it's my own fault it was born like this. I contaminated..."

She stares at Yennefer, and then she sits down on the floor in front of the chair and finds herself crying. She couldn't say why.

**Author's Note:**

> I welcome comments and I really do mean that. Do you want to say something you are absolutely, one-hundred-percent sure I can't possibly want to hear? Tell me anyway!


End file.
